I went looking for some information on a website today. For a school. I won’t name the school. The name of the school’s not really relevant except that they are a school and not a web development company.

What is relevant, however, is that their website did not work. Broken links, and forms that did not work. Their “Student Absence” form was broken! And they even linked to the form saying that you can fill that in to notify of student absences. I’d hate to see how many students have been incorrectly marked as awol.

I’m a web developer and have been for over a decade. Previously, I would excuse bad websites by saying “they’re a X, not web developers”. No more. Decent web development is not that expensive, and attention to detail should be the client’s responsibility to make sure they’re getting what they paid for – not just broken links but content as well. I think that having a broken website is worse than no website at all. And it’s a reflection of your business.